Growing up, Near had known nothing but softness. The blanket coiled around him as a baby, the tickle of his mother's hair on his cheeks, and even the palms of her hands when she'd tried to strangle the life out of him had been soft, in their way. So when his father left him on the carriage step of Whammy House, he hadn't taken to the unyielding stone beneath him well at all. And there was something else within those walls that would prove hard as well.
Mello. The blond was hard angles from every perspective, even as a child. At every forced contact, Near was afraid that the mere touch of his skin would rupture something deep within from which recovery would be impossible. His only possible recourse was to once again surround himself in softness, to file down the edges of anything he came in contact with...including most people. Near would come off as so strange and alarming that whatever sharpness someone possessed would be instantly blunted by his way of being. He wasn't so much interested if that person was soft to begin with, just that they cease to be that way around him whenever possible.
Mello was the exact opposite. He had no concept of personal space that wasn't his own, and unlike all of the others, even L, he refused to be subdued by Near's buffering social constructs. One day Mello was so tired of seeing Near in his white clothes that he forced him into the scratchiest, most threadbare wool sweater he could find. He took Near so far outside of his comfort zone by just living that there was a time when he would have done anything to be rid of him.
That was until Matt came along. Matt was a year younger, clumsy but not unintelligent, and above all, he actually managed to soften Mello around the edges a bit. Near would watch from the foyer on a calm spring day as the two would, instead of playing hopscotch or any other asinine games, work out quadratic equations on the sidewalk. Their heads would be bent together, shoulders touching, and eyes dancing.
That's all that would ever touch between them—shoulders; the occasional hand when Matt would stumble over some unforeseen traitor stone in the cobble walk. Either way, it made Near wonder how soft Matt had to be in order to do that to Mello...to make him smile instead of sneer, to make him laugh instead of make that crow-like cackle. What was there in that pale, usually bare shoulder that cowed Mello so completely?
Near never had a chance to find out. Six years later, both Matt and Mello were gone, within weeks of each other. Their parting, which Near had shamelessly observed through the crack of a door, had been a meeting of shoulders, followed by a brief tousle of hair. And as he walked away, Mello's hand lingered, touching his upper arm with trembling fingers, as if to take whatever softness Matt had imparted and insulate his shattered heart against the world they'd chosen to embrace.